I would think that I was the ultimate cynic, except that I'm too cynical to believe something like that.

Search This Blog

Loading...

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

We the people are more powerful than you the state can possibly imagine!

America is an armed society. Never before in the history of the world have so many private citizens possessed the means to fend off threatened tyranny. Without our consent, the consent of the governed, you don't have a government. I think would be tyrants are in for a world full of shock and awe if they try to disarm America.

The 2nd Amendment right to own guns is the right to own the means with which to protect ourselves from any would-be tyrant that seeks to undermine or overthrow all the other rights guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States of America. Yes, people like me are the only barrier that protects Americans from slavery. We're the only thing that stands between the freedom we've grown accustomed to, and some odious permutation of slavery. Yet despite this fact, they want us to give up our guns?

I want to try to explain this simple concept to someone who doesn't understand but I always come up against the same problem over and over...they really don't want to understand. So much so that they will literally run from me with their fingers stuck in their ears chanting "nah-nah-nah-nah-gah-listen...etc." Or worse, they patronize me or condescend down to me. The expressions on their faces get kind of sad or maybe even fearful as they contemplate my self-evident lunacy. They'll paraphrase my argument in a kind of stick-figure way and then sort of add stupid little touches much like a child drawing cartoon eye-glasses on a magazine portrait.

Most people on my side of this argument will at this point try to explain that every government inevitably malfunctions at some point. Every apparatus, every device, every man-made thing will at some point wear-out, breakdown, be gummed up, pirated, hijacked, corrupted, or eventually and inevitably become merely obsolete. This of course includes governments. One further thing that is obvious when you think about it but seldom if ever acknowledged is that those who seek political office do so because they desire to rule over the rest of us. When a judge bangs down his gavel, you must understand that this signifies he is making a unilateral decision, and based on the fact that he's sitting in judgment he feels that it is his right to do so. Consider then the misguided arrogance of a corrupt judge making unilateral decisions that destroy lives based on a flawed understanding of a malfunctioning and errant law that no longer even applies because of the ever-changing exigencies of our ever-more fluid culture. This is tyranny.

Our patent laws are a perfect example of this in action. Imagine—if you can—how wonderful life would be if companies were allowed to manufacture products and sell them to us without having to employ an army of lawyers and without having to hemorrhage millions upon billions in easement fees to a litany of patent holders? I don't know where this nation is headed but at some point I believe it will become completely impossible to invent anything and sell it. You have a better mousetrap? So what. Somebody has a patent that a team of lawyers will argue is similar to your mousetrap in some insignificant way and therefore your idea infringes and you must cease and desist and—by the way—pay damages.

Imagine if actual physical property was adjudicated like we do intellectual property. People would be laying claim to raindrops and clouds and beams of sunlight. They'd be suing others over the use of their air, or water, or who knows what. But I don't want to get off track. This example merely serves to illustrate that if America was a truck every gauge on the panel would be redlining and smoke would be boiling out from under the hood and a horrible banging sound would be thumping like a giant's dying heartbeat. As every passerby turned to stare in curiosity and amusement this antique contraption once called the American dream would roll down its last few sad and pointless miles.

The handwriting is on the wall at this point. You can look at countless parallels in history and what comes next is as telegraphed as a professional wrestler holding a folding metal chair. We're going to keep printing money because it's the easiest way to take money from the people and typically they are blind to this fiscal legerdemain. I argued with someone the other day that when the government started printing money to pay bills it was engaging in the most destructive taxation possible, because it was hurting the poorest of us the most, and the richest the least. I could never seem to get through to him, though.

Taxation—whether it is income taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, excise taxes, capital gains taxes, etc—is a way of taking wealth from the private sector and using that wealth to pay the bills that the public sector must pay in order to continue to operate. If you directly take the money from a citizen's pockets he knows he's been taxed and he resents the intrusion. He resents the fewer dollars in his wallet and he thinks about the things he could have purchased if he only had the money the government had taken away. The result of this taxation is that he has less wealth with which to purchase goods and services and the government has more. Now consider what happens when the government raises money by printing it. More dollars are available for the government to purchase goods and services. They create this money from thin air, but it doesn't go back into thin air. It goes into the economy. Now there are many more dollars chasing the same amount of goods and services. This is called inflation and lately after QE1, QE2, and now the never ending QE3, there's more than twice as many dollars in circulation, and if you haven't noticed this at the gas pump or at the checkout counter then I guess you don't do much driving or shopping.

We're all being taxed to death! This indirect taxation which comes from borrowing money and from printing money can only lead to one outcome...nationwide insolvency. When that day comes, when our credit rating has been downgraded to the point where it's too expensive to borrow money, the government will do what every failed regime in history has always done, they'll just print more money to pay the bills. This is just the same old sad story replayed one more time. It's a dark and ghastly tale of government-goons running amok, while they attempt to set wages and attempt to set prices, and attempt to micro-manage a macro-economy from a central office, and are then shocked! when the people rebel. It can't work. It has never worked. People will starve to death. They'll freeze to death in the winter and they'll drop dead in the streets from minor illnesses that their starving bodies can't fight off. They'll flee to Mexico or Canada or anywhere they think might be better. The problem is that because America is the engine of the world-economy, everywhere else will be just as bad if not worse. There's nothing positive to look-forward to. This is an out-of-control train-wreck in the offing and I don't see anything that can slow it down or even mitigate the disaster when it finally happens. And despite the starvation this economic disaster will entail, despite the panic of millions upon millions, despite the mobs of looters and rioters angry and starving and all looking for a likely scapegoat to sacrifice, they want me to give up my guns?

I think everybody knows it's going to happen. I think everybody knows America is going to go bankrupt. At some point in every failed endeavor there comes a point when the participants look around at their colleagues and they exchange that look. It's the look the people on the Titanic gave to each other when the last lifeboat was cut away. It's the look townspeople give to each other when they realize the sandbags are not going to stop the rising flood-waters. It's the look people give each other when they know that everything they have, perhaps even their very lives, faces destruction, and there's nothing, absolutely nothing, that anybody can do to stop it. It's at this point that some people start crying. It's here that some people start praying. Others try to flee. Some people with little imagination just keep piling on the sandbags... but to no avail.

Look around people. We are going to go bankrupt. There's not a thing anybody can do about it. If you want to stand around and argue about the placement of sandbags or who's meeting or not meeting their shared sandbag responsibility, be my guest, but our ineluctable fate is nigh and there's nothing that can save us at this point...well I guess miracles sometimes happen. Perhaps some deus-ex-machina led miracle will suddenly provide enough wealth to save the day. We can always hope that one of our neighbors shows up soon with an army of sandbag-filling robots or maybe even a levee-printer. I guess anything is possible, but in my opinion it's not very likely. Maybe it is that some heretofore yet to be invented technology could save civilization. Maybe somebody will create a machine which generates universally abundant and incredibly cheap energy from somewhere, somehow, without adverse climatological symptoms. Perhaps soon artificially intelligent robots will come marching out of some factory and start doing all the jobs that Americans used to do. I'm not holding my breath. Even if somebody did invent an amazing free-energy forever machine it would be tied up in court—for patent infringement—until long after our corpses had become dust in the wind.

This is the way that totalitarian regimes have always seized power after an economic collapse. First they'll come to take away the firearms...disarmed for the good of society. Later they'll come to take away the surplus food...theft for the good of society. Next they'll come to make sure everyone is doing their fair share...slavery for the good of society. Dissenters will be crushed. Pride will be crushed. Hope will be crushed. Decades or perhaps even centuries later the history books will be written and then changed and then rewritten. It always starts by making the victims powerless to prevent the crime.

You say our simple weapons can't fight against the might of the state? You say that it's hopeless and absurd to believe that little 'ol me and my rifle can stand athwart the juggernaut of totalitarian destruction coming down the tracks at mach-ten? If you believe that then you don't understand leadership. If you believe that then you don't understand patriotism. If you believe that then you just keep stacking sandbags while the water flows over your head. The lifeblood of the state rests not on the might of its weapons, but on the consent of the governed. There is no military without food. There is no police or Department of Homeland Security without electricity, without gasoline, without water, and without cooperation. If the tracks are sabotaged, the highways undermined, the waterways filled with jagged debris then the trucks don't roll, the trains don't run, the ships don't float...and the soldiers don't march.